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So everything has been humming along since I bought the Linksys extender, or so I thought. I noticed that last week’s American Idol results show had not recorded. When I check the history I was given a message about Copyright and Restricted Content (I can’t remember the exact message off the top of my head). I remembered seeing this issue on the forums over at the Green Button so I jumped over there.

The discussion thread was long (about 30 pages) and old (going back to March 2007). I thought I was experiencing the exact same issue but after some further research I am not so sure.

The first thing I found in my research was that the problem was only showing up on one Tuner – Tuner A. Now that may be because it always tried to record on A and never tried B, so that did not rule out Tuner B from having the problem. I unplugged Tuner A and ran with one tuner and it worked great.

So after my first test I was more confident that it was Tuner A and not a system wide problem. My first thought was a Cable Card issue. I kept a close eye on things and tried to ensure that Tuner B was doing all the recording. As I did this, I noticed something else. I was able to watch TV on the tuner but not record.

To research my new symptom, I jumped into the web page for each tuner. I noticed that the tuner was somehow dropping out of Digital into Analog on the DRM page. Well, according to how Cable Card is supposed to work this would be my problem. It has to stay digital to apply the appropriate DRM or it does not work.

It may be that my signal is not strong enough do to the split or it may be that something is wrong with the cable card. I will be doing some more monitoring tonight and report back soon.